Get your Medical Records
Translated by
certified Chinese translator

If you were treated in a hospital in mainland China, Hong Kong or Taiwan and a UK doctor, insurer or solicitor now has to read that file, the thing you need is a certified English translation of it. That covers 病历 case notes, 诊断证明书 diagnosis certificates, 出院小结 discharge summaries, 检验报告 laboratory reports and 体检报告 annual health-check reports. I translate them from Chinese into English and certify the result with my signature, my professional membership details and a statement that the translation is complete and accurate. The rate is £30 per page, where a page is 250 words of text, standard turnaround is 24 hours, and the finished translation arrives as a signed PDF.

Chinese medical paperwork rarely arrives as one tidy document. An outpatient visit produces a 门诊病历 booklet that the patient keeps and the doctor writes in by hand at each visit, with prescription slips and test results folded inside it. An admission produces a far thicker 住院病历: admission record, ward-round notes, operation record, nursing charts, and finally the 出院小结, which is the single page most UK clinicians actually want. That discharge summary follows a fixed shape — 入院情况, 诊疗经过, 出院诊断, 出院医嘱 — and translates cleanly. A 诊断证明书 is usually one sheet: diagnosis, doctor’s signature, and a red hospital seal, often a dedicated 门诊专用章 or 病历专用章 rather than the hospital’s general seal.

The requests I see most often are these:

• doctors and dentists trained in China assembling evidence for GMC or GDC registration, where training records, employment letters and clinical logs all sit in Chinese;
• NHS clinicians picking up treatment that began abroad, who need the history, the imaging reports and the current drug list in English before a referral or an operation;
• travel and private medical insurers assessing a claim for treatment received in China, who generally want the diagnosis certificate and the itemised bills as well as the notes;
• solicitors in personal injury, clinical negligence or immigration matters, where medical evidence has to go into a bundle in English.

Two things make these harder than a birth certificate. The first is handwriting: ward notes are written at speed, in cursive characters, with clinical shorthand mixed in — Latin abbreviations such as BP, WBC or NS sitting inside Chinese sentences, plus department contractions that only make sense in context. I read them in context rather than guessing character by character, and where a word genuinely cannot be made out I mark it as illegible instead of inventing a plausible one. The second is that much of the content is not prose at all. Laboratory results are numbers set against Chinese reference ranges in Chinese units, and I reproduce values, units and ranges exactly as printed. Restating a result against a UK range, or converting mmol/L into mg/dL, is clinical interpretation and belongs to the doctor reading the report. Seals are described in brackets where they fall, signatures are marked as signatures, and traditional-medicine prescriptions keep the pinyin formula name with a literal gloss, because most 中成药 have no settled English name.

For a quote, send photographs or scans of every page you want covered, including the back of the outpatient booklet and the reverse of test slips, which people routinely forget. Shoot straight on, in daylight, with the whole sheet in frame. Tell me which episode of care matters, so we are not translating three years of routine check-ups when the recipient wants one admission, and give me the patient’s name spelled exactly as it appears on the passport. Most jobs come back the next working day; if you are working to a clinic appointment or a claim deadline, say so when you write and I will confirm the date before starting — here is how the timings usually work. Corrections after delivery are part of the job, and notarisation of the certification can be added if the receiving body asks for it.